Durarara!! episode 6

One thing that no site seems to be able to agree on is how many epis­odes Dur­arara has. Some say 12 and oth­ers say 24. Now I know most people plead that their favour­ite show will have 24 epis­odes and I’m sure people will say the same with Dur­arara. Some­thing along the lines of ‘we need more time to get the plot rolling’ or some­thing like that. But many of the more reli­able sources (aka: not MAL) says that it might only have 12. Think­ing back, I did think it was odd to see Brains Base sud­denly make the jump to a 24 epis­ode series when they haven’t done that before. I simply assumed it was a nat­ural jump to make given how much they were hyp­ing up Dur­arara (with good reason, as it’s shown thus far). So as much as I’d like it to have 24 epis­odes, I’m going to have to brace myself for 12. At least then if it does go on for longer I’ll be pleas­antly sur­prised. It’s all point­less spec­u­la­tion any­way. Which, by curi­ous coin­cid­ence, is exactly what most of my posts are.

::Edit:: Shi­maru just informed me that psgels said the offi­cial site says 24 epis­odes. Con­vo­luted sys­tem of learn­ing this info aside, hur­rah for 24 epis­odes! I was just try­ing to be optim­istic with that open­ing para­graph but I really do feel this needs 24 episodes.

I won’t say I was look­ing for­ward to these guys finally get­ting an epis­ode of their own, because that’s not quite true. But I did think that is des­per­ately what Dur­arara needed because these guys were becom­ing an odd group that seemed to serve no pur­pose except to make otaku ref­er­ences and carry round card­board cutouts of hot wolf girls. But what I didn’t expect is for them to per­form so well, this was my favour­ite epis­ode of Dur­arara so far. Being a mem­ber of Dol­lars was a total shock. I assumed these were the nor­mal people in the show (to a given value of nor­mal) but that’s been shoved in my face. Every­one is involved some­how in this giant gang war and head­less hunt some­how. Except Mikado. Again, the reason he sticks out in this show is because he is the only truly nor­mal per­son in this show.

Talk­ing about Mikado, his short scene with Anri and Kida was one of the many high­lights of the epis­ode. Some­times the nor­mal char­ac­ter in a show full of nut­ters can drag any scene down he’s in (Reki from Clay­more any­one?) but their scene was quite a lot of fun, although that was mainly down to Simon. I’m not sure if it’s because he has a funny accent or because he always starts each scene with ‘Irashai, irashai’ but I always find myself grin­ning whenever Simon comes on the scene. I won­der what he does out­side of work­ing at that Sushi shop of his? The only ref­er­ences to him being any­where else always comes back to his sushi shop. His fight against Shizuo? Mak­ing a deliv­ery. Know­ing about human parts in other sushi res­taur­ants? Check­ing out his competition.

Yeah, can­nabal­ism. This is where my crazy the­or­iz­ing comes into play yet again. We finally got to see the final char­ac­ter from the open­ing we’d yet to meet. Namie Yagiri, the brother of the worst eloper ever, Seiji Yagiri (ser­i­ously man. I’m no expert at elop­ing but shouldn’t you at least leave the town you live in?). Now I ser­i­ously doubt there’s any can­nab­il­ism from any­one in this show, but she definately con­firmed they were exper­i­ment­ing on humans. Go into a slum, nick your­self a for­eigner (but not Simon. They may be thugs but you’d have to be some idiot to take on Simon) bring it back and she’ll exper­i­ment on it. And that brings me to this.

I’ve grown quite attached to my ‘Har­ima is wear­ing Celty’s head’ the­ory so work­ing my way around that, what we have here is pos­sibly Harima’s head and the girl who has the Dullahan’s head is now elop­ing *pfft* with her brother. What sort of fucked up world to this lot live in? Let me get this straight. Seiji has a stalker so his sis­ter takes the head of a myth­ical Irish fairy and trans­plants the head onto the stalker, keep­ing the head in her pos­ses­sion, and now Seiji falls madly in love with her.…wow, that is ser­i­ously messed up. Maybe my the­ory isn’t right after all. That all sounds too crazy to be true, even by Dur­arara standards.

Any char­ac­ter who listens to Pavorotti will instantly become one of my favour­ites, espe­cially if they sing along. What I enjoyed about him was how at first he seemed like a rather racist char­a­cature of for­eign­ers. I mean, just look at the pic­ture. Notice the wider eyes and the hairy palms (Asian men have seem­ingly no hair. That Singa­por­ean guy in my flat must shave his legs or some­thing, espe­cially com­pared to my Gor­illa legs). The epis­ode even went to por­tray him as a bum­bling idiot, only to later on show that they guy has a bit of brain even while drugged. He was seen as a valu­able friend by the Dol­lars gang and one who they could also rely upon in a pinch. It was quite a smart piece of work by Dur­arara look­ing back at it. They manip­u­lated me by get­ting me to dis­miss this guy only to show his use­ful­ness later on. This should teach me never to dis­miss a man who can sing Nes­sum Dorma.

So  this is why Celty was afraid of ali­ens. Watch­ing these crappy con­spir­acy pro­grammes. We don’t have them in Ire­land. Nobody ever thinks they’ve been abduc­ted. They assume those nights they can’t remem­ber and that funny mark on their arm to be from a drunken night out when they fell in a bush. Which is nor­mally true any­way. Talk­ing ’bout Celty, epis­ode 4 has had an unusual effect on her appear­ance in the anime. When she’s bomb­ing about Ikebukero, she’s no longer this mys­ter­i­ous fig­ure who we all wow over. She’s been human­ised and gets scared or embar­rassed like any other human It’s odd how the char­ac­ter who has one of the most nor­mal human emo­tions is the one without a head.

Me while watch­ing Dur­arara. Yes, I’m totally in love with this show. I have to keep my word count down to not much more over 1000 per post so I’m going to have to shut up now, but this epis­ode shoved Dur­arara even fur­ther ahead of any other com­pet­i­tion this sea­son. Even the char­ac­ters who I thought would be the dull ones of the sea­son have turned out to be an epic group of Dol­lars who tor­ture people by mak­ing them read Ladies vs But­lers. Then next week we’ve been prom­ised nar­ra­tion by Shizuo.

Duar­arararararararararararararararararara